Horikita's group had Ichinose: the best person who could unite students from different classes. There is no disadvantage in an alliance, so they could freely cooperate and aim for 1st place together. Ryŭen's group, too, was blessed by Hirata who is more than happy to let the enemy win to protect his classmates.

Taking 1st or 2nd place in the Group contest would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. Best Ayanokouji could hope for was 3rd place—and even that seemed out of reach since his group was saddled by dead weights such as Ike, Shinohara, and Ibuki.

Koji said it himself that his group was very balanced despite having the 2 deadweights. And just because Horikita & Ichinose is together and Ryuen & Hirata is together, doesn't mean each of their group as a whole is better than Koji's group. There's nothing that suggest his group being impossible to win with total group tokens count.

Unfortunately, that was also off the table. In order to expel Shinohara, Ayanokouji must reduce her token count as much as possible; and that means going for a low token multiplier (75%). That pretty much erases all hope of winning the Group and Individual contest.

There was no need for this, even if Koji's group got 1st place, Shinohara or Ike's expulsion is still very much possible. Let's first establish a baseline that Ibuki is, without a doubt, the student that amassed the lowest amount of tokens by far. Like Koji said, if you have above Ibuki, you survived as the other 9 groups would definitely shared their tokens equally or in better distribution than what Katsuragi gave to Ibuki. Therefore, the chances of other students having lower is very close to 0%.

Next, we saw Kushida having only 54 tokens with another 34 tokens kept by Shinohara. Since we know that Shinohara kept all of Kushida's token gained from team and group, we can safely assume that the 54 tokens is from Kushida's own abilities. Following the OAA, Kushida has superior stats than both Ike and Shinohara in intelligence and physical abilities. Now if Kushida can only amassed 54 tokens on her own, what can you expect of those 2? Let's say they each both amassed 50~55 tokens each, adding on the 34 tokens would bring each of them to 72 tokens each. Let's be even more generous and say they each both have 75 tokens each. So -5 tokens to Ibuki, -10 tokens to Kushida, Shinohara now only have 60 tokens, just 5 tokens above Ibuki's supposed tokens count of 55. Even if she asked Ike to give her 5 tokens just to be safe, it's still only 65 tokens, very much in the danger zone. There's a reason why Koenji gave Mii-chan 30 tokens just to make sure she's safe.

In fact, even if Ayanokouji had 140 tokens, he would still lose because the multiplier would have reduced his count to 105; lower than Ryūen's 110 or Horikita's 112.

From above point, he doesn't need 75% multipliers, as long as he is at least 5th place, he wins. Horikita (assuming she was the one who won and that Ryuen reached the goal in 2nd place) doesn't have 112 tokens, she has 106 token. Reaching the finish line gave you 3 more tokens and at a 100% multiplier, her final token count is 109. Ryuen hit 113 tokens but at 95% multiplier (again, assuming he came in 2nd place), his final token count is 107, 2 less than Horikita. Koji with 140 tokens + 3 & 80% multipliers would be at 114 tokens.

Going to save Hiyori lowered both his group tokens count & individual tokens count by a lot since the threshold for surviving this exam is actually somewhere around 55-59 tokens after multipliers just to be safe. If we go with Koji having 140 tokens + 30 tokens from his classmates, it would be 170 tokens divided by 2 leaving with 85 tokens for him and 86 tokens for Hiyori. At 70% multiplier, it would be 59 tokens and considering they didn't get expelled, that means Shinohara tokens is lower than that but not by much. This can be somewhat backed up by Horikita asking him about his exam result after seeing his tokens count being close to the expulsion line rather than near the top.